like a funereal baldachin above the projecting
cornices of Doctor Lombard's street, and Wyant walked for some distance
in the shade of the beetling palace fronts before his eye fell on
a doorway surmounted by a sallow marble hand. He stood for a moment
staring up at the strange emblem. The hand was a woman's--a dead
drooping hand, which hung there convulsed and helpless, as though it had
been thrust forth in denunciation of some evil mystery within the house,
and had sunk struggling into death.

A girl who was drawing water from the well in the court said that the
English doctor lived on the first floor, and Wyant, passing through
a glazed door, mounted the damp degrees of a vaulted stairway with a
plaster AEsculapius mouldering in a niche on the landing. Facing the
AEsculapius was another door, and as Wyant put his hand on the bell-rope
he remembered his unknown friend's injunction, and rang twice.

His ring was answered by a peasant woman with a low forehead and small
close-set eyes, who, after a prolonged scrutiny of himself, his card,
and his letter of introduction, left him standing in a high, cold
ante-chamber floored with brick. He heard her wooden pattens click down
an interminable corridor, and after some delay she returned and told him
to follow her.

They passed through a long saloon, bare as the ante-chamber, but loftily
vaulted, and frescoed with a seventeenth-century Triumph of Scipio or
Alexander--martial figures following Wyant with the filmed melancholy
gaze of shades in limbo. At the end of this apartment he was admitted
to a smaller room, with the same atmosphere of mortal cold, but showing
more obvious signs of occupancy. The walls were covered with tapestry
which had faded to the gray-brown tints of decaying vegetation, so that
the young man felt as though he were entering a sunless autumn wood.
Against these hangings stood a few tall cabinets on heavy gilt feet, and
at a table in the window three persons were seated: an elderly lady
who was warming her hands over a brazier, a girl bent above a strip of
needle-work, and an old man.

As the latter advanced toward Wyant, the young man was conscious of
staring with unseemly intentness at his small round-backed figure,
dressed with shabby disorder and surmounted by a wonderful head,
lean, vulpine, eagle-beaked as that of some art-loving despot of the
Renaissance: a head combining the venerable hair and large prominent
eyes of the humanist with the